31 December 2014

Aftermath in Sarajevo

There are some positive developments in the region, mostly emanating from Belgrade. Slobodan Milošević was toppled by popular demonstrations in 2000 and died in 2006 in The Hague, where he was standing trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Boris Tadić, Serbia’s president since 2004, is a pro-European liberal who has tried to steer his people away from the belligerent nationalism that was the undoing of Yugoslavia. On May 26, 2011, Serbia arrested sixty-nine-year-old Ratko Mladić, who had been living under an assumed name with relatives. “We have ended a difficult period of our history and removed the stain from the face of Serbia and the members of our nation wherever they live,” Tadić said in announcing the arrest.

Tadić was born in Sarajevo and has come several times as president; a formal state visit to the city in July 2011 raised expectations of better relations. The year before, Tadić had made a tearful pilgrimage to Srebrenica for the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre, July 11, 2010, kneeling at the memorial for victims. (Unfortunately, Tadić has been less conciliatory when it comes to Kosovo, which declared its independence in 2009 and has been recognized by the United States and European Union, but not by Serbia.)

Bosnia’s current leaders are mostly Social Democrats, who inched ahead of the ethnic parties in the general elections in 2010. At Sarajevo’s City Hall, I was ushered in to meet Mayor Alija Behmen, who told me enthusiastically about the various initiatives he hoped would reintegrate Serbs into the city. Working together, he and the mayor of Pale (“a very nice fellow,” said Behmen), had begun a $40 million project to restore the cable car from Sarajevo to Mount Trebević. An even more ambitious proposal would extend Sarajevo’s trams to Pale to make it easier for the estimated ten thousand people per day who commute to the city. “Multiethnicity is the sine qua non of civilization,” said Behmen, a genial man with white wispy hair and pouches under his eyes that reminded me of Frank Morgan playing the Wizard of Oz. “I know everything is still not in the best order, but we are going in the right direction.”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get things done in Bosnia. The multilayered structure of the Bosnian government almost guarantees paralysis. After the October 2010 elections, it took fifteen months for the Social Democrats to get a coalition government approved. “The reform of public administration is essential,” said Behmen. “Each official has two assistants and each assistant has two assistants and so you have this big pyramid.” With the benefit of hindsight the Dayton pact has been judged a great success insofar as it stopped the war, but it was in essence a cease-fire agreement, not a plan for a functional government.

Bosnia faced an almost-farcical predicament in spring of 2011, when the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) threatened to ban it from competition because there were three presidents of the Bosnian football association instead of just one as required by FIFA. The Bosnian Serb president, Milorad Dodik, put up a fuss, telling reporters he was “against having one president of anything in Bosnia, even a beekeepers’ association.” Although a compromise was reached, it underscored Bosnia’s dilemma: If it barely qualified for international soccer competitions, how could it possibly dream of joining the European Union.